Aliens &amp UFOs

Brazillian sightings, 1996-1997

Tales have emerged over the last couple of years about a fascinating series
of sightings of unexplained craft and creatures in Southern Brazil. The period
from 1996-1997 saw the greatest UFO activity in that region for 25 years, along
with a "captured aliens" case which could put Roswell in the shade! I have gathered
together the following "timeline" from a number of sources, both contemporary
with the events listed and retrospectively researched by a number of investigators.
I have appended a list of major sources at the end, and hope that visitors to
the site may be able to confirm or refute the accuracy of the reports, or suggest
other sources where appropriate.

Timeline:

Saturday, January 13th, 1996

Early morning: (the exact time does not appear in any of the
reports) NORAD began tracking one or more unidentified objects heading
over American airspace. When the object(s) left U.S. airspace, they were
travelling towards Brazil. NORAD contacted the Brazilian authorities, and
several jets were scrambled to attempt to intercept them. Radar confirmed
the existence of one or more objects, tracked heading over Minas Gerias,
in the direction of Varginha, a large industrial town 330Km North-East
of Rio de Janeiro.

8am: An ultralight pilot, Carlos Souza, was driving between Sao
Paulo and Belo Horizonte, when he witnessed a "cigar shaped" craft approx.
120 meters above the highway making a "strange noise". The craft had windows
along the side, and appeared to have a large jagged hole in the front,
with a "crack" running from the hole to the middle of the craft, issuing
forth smoke or "vapour". The craft was flying quite slowly, moving Northward.
Souza followed the craft as best he could in his pickup, but eventually
lost sight of it. After twenty minutes of searching, down a dirt track
he came upon a large expanse of "wreckage", along with a helecopter, an
ambulance, two trucks, several cars and about 40 armed soldiers!

(This strand of the story is frustratingly
incomplete, as there is no attempt to say whether or not there was a "conventional"
explanation for the wreckage. If anyone out there has easy access to back issues
of Brazilian newspapers, perhaps you could check the date out and E-Mail me
any reports published at the time, to confirm whether there was indeed a mundane
explanation for this "crash site".)

Saturday, January 20th, 1996

1am: Farmhands Oralina Augusta and Eurico Rodrigues were awakened
by the noise of a disturbance in their cattle herd. They went outside to
see "a grey object, similar to a submarine, the size of a small bus", emitting
what appeared to be white smoke. (One researcher, Claudeir
Covo, speculates that, given the similarity to Souza’s earlier sighting,
the unlikelyness of two such sightings on sequential Saturdays and the
fact that both stories were being told some time after the fact, it is
conceivable that either of the witnesses could have "mixed up" the weekends.
This would suggest that both events could have happened on either the 13th
or the 20th…)

Between 8am and 9:30am: A group of passers-by sighted a "strange
creature" in woodland around 2Km from the centre of Varginha. A woman came
upon three teenage boys throwing stones at the creature to try to elicit
a reaction – she told them to stop, and called out the local fire brigade.
(It is a regular part of the fire brigade’s duties to capture wild animals
which stray into the city bounds – they routinely carry nets, cages etc.
for this purpose.) The brigade responded to the call, but
immediately realised that they were not dealing with a conventional wild
animal. They radioed the fire station, who in turn contacted the military
academy (the Escola de Sargentos das Armas or "Army Sergeant’s School")
at Tres Coracoes, 25Km away.

10:30am: By the time the firemen had captured the creature an
army truck had arrived from the Sergeant’s School to take charge of it.
The creature was placed in a box, under a sheet in the back of the truck,
and driven away.

2pm: A jogger passing the woods in the Santana district of Varginha
saw seven armed soldiers enter the woods in what appeared to be a search formation.
A couple of minutes later, he heard three rifle shots. On returning to the scene,
he saw four soldiers carrying two "body bags" emerge from the woods. One bag
contained a still form, while the other was "squirming".

No further information about this incident
has been uncovered, but given the date, time, place and lack of comment by the
local military, local investigators believe it is probably safe to assume a
connection with the other "captured creatures" that day.

3:30pm: Three young women (Two sisters, Liliane and Valquiria
Silva, and their friend Katia Xavier) were returning home from their jobs
as housemaids. They took a shortcut over a patch of waste ground in the
area of Jardim Andere, 2km from the centre of Varginha. They were frightened
to witness a strange creature a few meters from the side of the path. "He
was squatting, with his long arms between his legs" reported Liliane.
"It was not an animal and it certainly wasn’t human" was how Katia
recalled it. "The creature seemed afraid."

The girls described the creature as about one meter tall, having huge,
red eyes, shiny brownish skin with what appeared to be a slippery, oily
coating, long arms and three small rounded horns protruding from its large
head. The creature made a slight movement with its head, and the three
girls ran away screaming, believing that they had just encountered the
Devil! Luiza Silva, the mother of Liliane and Valquiria, returned to the
waste ground forty minutes later to investigate her daughter’s stories,
but saw no sign of the creature. She did, however, note a strange and unpleasant
smell lingering at the location.

6pm: A violent hailstorm, extremely unusual for the time of year,
erased any tracks which may have remained in the woods. (Witnesses had
described "paw prints" resembling a human hand opened out with a space
between the ring and middle finger. Skeptics point out that this is in
fact the "Vulcan salute" used by the "Spock" character in the original
series of Star Trek…!) Just after this, one report says that another "humanoid"
creature was sighted and captured by two policemen.

Early evening: (after 6pm) Army trucks arrived at the "Hospital
Regional" in the centre of Vaginha, bringing a body for autopsy. As it
was a busy Saturday night in the city centre, many people witnessed their
arrival and leaving. Hospital staff say they were told to take the body
away because the hospital "was only equipped to deal with humans"…

Late evening: Some reports say that the military captured a further
creature, possibly the one seen by the girls at 3:30pm.

Monday, January 22nd, 1996

Morning: (before dawn) One or more creatures was brought by the
army to "Hospital Humanitas", Campinas, Sao Paulo. Hospital staff witnessed
a number of vehicles from the University of Sao Paulo, along with two Americans
carrying "Strange devices" visit the buildings during that morning.

Evening: A military operation, reputedly run by "S-2" (Brazilian
intelligence) was arranged to remove one dead creature from the hospital.
This involved at least three trucks, one for the body and two "decoys".
According to soldiers who claim to have been involved in this operation,
the body, now smelling very bad, was removed to the University of Campinas,
where it was to be examined by Dr. Badan Palhares, a world-acclaimed professional
in the field of autopsies. Both the University and Dr. Palhares deny involvement
in any such events.

All through January 1996, UFOs continued to be seen over Southern
Brazil, with sightings in Sao Tome de Letras, Tres Coracoes, Conselheiro
Lafaiete and Pouso Alegre.

April 1996: A woman sitting on the veranda of the restaurant
at Varginha zoo saw a strange creature, fitting the earlier descriptions,
looking at her from behind a railing a few meters away. The creature ran
off, vaulting a low wall. Zoo staff recalled that over the past three months
there had been a number of unexplained deaths amongst the animals in the
zoo, averaging at least one animal a week, often with no signs of a cause
of death. These strange deaths stopped after this sighting.

May 1996: A student driving along the Varginha – Tres Coracoes
highway spotted a strange creature which started to cross the highway in
front of him, then darted back into the roadside bushes. When he reported
this, he found out that the spot was right where the highway ran past the
farm where Oralina Augusta and Eurico Rodrigues reported the strange craft
on January 20th.

May 1997: UFOs were being sighted "nightly", shortly after sundown,
over Ribeiro Branco, a small town 350km from Sao Paulo. The main national
TV network, "Redo Globo" broadcast two features on the phenomenon.

July 1st 1997

Evening: An incandescent disc-shaped object was sighted lighting up
the skies of the city of Nova Brasiliandia. There was a loud noise like an explosion
which shook houses in the city, and the object disappeared from view. The object
is alleged to have "crashed" at a ranch in the Teresopolis district, on the
edge of the Manso river. One witness, named as Gilberto Braga, a local cowboy,
described the crashed object as "an iron ball, bigger than a tractor, that
released an odd smell". Another witness described the object as "black",
"the size of a truck",and said it was impossible to remain near
it for any length of time because of the smell it produced.

(The story took over a week to "break",
and by this time, the locals had become very secretive about the location of
the "crash site", deliberately misdirecting TV crews and reporters. I have yet
to find out any follow-up to this story.)

Professor Stanton T. Friedman, Canadian physicist
and UFO researcher. (Professor Friedman, in an interview broadcast in
the feature "Brazilian Roswell" on Channel 5 television in the UK, said
that he found the case both interesting and compelling. One aspect he highlighted
was the reported behavior of the creatures involved, compared to reports
of the "Roswell aliens". Friedman suggested that their behavior was not
so much that of intelligent creatures who had just been piloting a craft
from a distant planet, but rather that of "cargo" who had been dumped in
a strange landscape and didn’t know what to do…?)